Red Sails in the Sunset
No, I can’t see Russia from my house in Sonoma County, but I might’ve had a glimpse a couple hundred years ago. With Tsar Putin gobbling up the Crimea and eyeing the rest of the Ukraine, I started thinking about how things might have been if the Russkies still had a foothold here in California. That unsettling notion prompted me to make a trip up the coast to explore their vanished colony and contemplate what might have been. In 1725, Peter the Great took time out from building his new capital city, St. Petersburg, to try colonizing the Pacific territories of North America before Spain beat him to it. He made little headway, but his lust for expansion was continued by Catherine the Great who, sixty years later, had herself a tiny settlement in Alaska. The...
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